I’ve been making a scrapbook for nearly six months.

In truth, I could finish it in the next 20 minutes, but I won’t. Once I turn the last page, close the book, and let out that sigh of completion, I fear what will happen to all those moments inside. Bound now to paper and frozen images, remembered only by a date and a place.

It was spring—I had just closed another book a few days earlier, one filled with many chapters: college. And just a few days after that, I found myself in a stranger’s towering pickup truck, so high off the ground that he had to lift me out. We bumped down a long, dark dirt road in the pitch-black night of a state I’d never given much thought to before. Now, I fear Montana will cross my mind every day until I die.

It’s strange how something unfamiliar, irrelevant even, can transform into a fundamental part of who you are, shaping your future in ways you never expected. I imagine this feeling is common, yet it pulses through me as if I’m the only person alive who has ever experienced nostalgia. I recall a video I watched years ago, a man walking down a dimly lit street, defining sonder. And sonder, I’ve realized, has become me.

For me, it all starts with Montana.

The breeze there felt different—something in its touch. The water moved with ferocity, unmerciful, pulling you in with its persuasive current. The trees stood tall, dark, weathered by time, some scorched by fires from years before, others newly alive with the season. The first tree I identified in Glacier was the Lodgepole Pine. Its cones are serotinous, only opening and releasing seeds in the heat of a fire—a testament to resilience, redefining the balance of nature.

I remember standing behind the cabin where I’d been dropped off the night before, seeing the mountains for the first time. The air was colder than I expected, and the sun, though harsh, brought no warmth. Inside the cabin, I found the fridge full of ingredients for something I didn’t know how to make. So, I settled for plain yogurt and a piece of cheese, fiddling with a Keurig that looked like it had never been used.

It’s strange how the body reacts to new environments. I am timid, cautious, a bit aloof when introduced to new places or people. Like a fruit, I ripen slowly, becoming sweeter, perhaps more palatable over time. I’ve come to admit, reluctantly, that I’m the kind of fruit requiring a deepened palate to truly appreciate.

A friend once told me I was “not palatable.” That phrase has followed me like a shadow.

I remember seeing the cabins, noting how weathered they looked, how seasoned they felt. My first morning there, I crossed paths with a white-tailed deer, head down, deliberately unconcerned, moving along the dirt road as if my presence were of no consequence. I wandered without a destination, eyes alert, steps uncertain. That white-tailed deer became a familiar sight. I saw her almost every day.

Now, I sit with this scrapbook, marking the names of people in the photos, recording the dates and places when I remember. I scroll through my camera roll for accuracy, but I close my eyes, trying to recall the feeling of the water when I first jumped into the lake. I remember it being icy and clear—harsh on the skin. After a while, my body would go numb, my skin turning red and tough to the touch. A smile creeps across my face as I think about how, one day, I jumped into those unfamiliar waters with people whose last names I didn’t even know, and now, those same people occupy some of my fondest memories.

Montana’s state flower is the bitterroot. I didn’t learn that until I started making this scrapbook. States and time zones now separate us.

It’s a strange phenomenon, the way people shift from extras to main characters in your life. I experience this again and again, yet each time it overwhelms me. One day, someone thinks of you on their walk home from work, calls you like clockwork. The next, you have no idea where they are or where they’re heading. There are only a few pages left in my scrapbook. I have everything I need to complete them, but I’m frozen, knowing this. Can these memories really be over? And yet, it’s been six months since I left Montana.

“Lean into the fear,” I tell myself.

The navy blue scrapbook sits unfinished under a stack of books on my bedroom floor. I sit cross-legged on the grass, looking down at my knee scars, realizing I haven’t been able to sit this way in months. My mind is still frozen in time, in that icy lake, with people whose last names I now know, haunted by concepts. But my body, scarred yet healing, reminds me that time moves forward.

Time, like a leaf in the wind, drifts on.

I couldn’t sleep last night. Restless Leg Syndrome, they call it. I once saw myself as a restless current, always chasing the horizon, pushing against the edges of my own existence, seeking the thrill of motion just to feel alive. That cliché was written long ago. Upon reflection, I think of Montana’s streams, how they flow fiercely at the start of summer and fall silent just a few months later. There’s a bittersweet quality to nature in Montana—the cold, dry nights, scarcity of berries, but then, the sweet promise of snowmelt feeding rivers, feeding fireweed, huckleberries, and glacial lilies to life in the valleys. The cycle repeats, season after season, like clockwork.

I am but a tree, shedding its leaves in the fall, standing bare in winter’s stillness, only to bloom again in the spring. Each cycle represents moments of loss, reflection, and renewal—an endless rhythm where we are stripped down, rebuilt, and made new, continually evolving with the turning of time.

Movement is the catalyst of change, and today, I can put one foot in front of the other, walking into the next season. 

Perhaps tomorrow I can turn over the last page of my scrapbook…